Panelists review rising cost of students' textbooks

Board of Regents session

If high textbook prices are a burning issue at the University of Georgia, you couldn't tell it by the audience at a Thursday forum to discuss the topic.

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Just 35 people showed up for the meeting at UGA's Georgia Center for Continuing Education, and just seven of them appeared to be young enough to be UGA students. Among the rest were UGA administrators and professors, representatives from other schools, workers helping conduct the session for the Georgia Center and several bookstore and book publishing representatives.

The session was the third conducted by a state Board of Regents task force at colleges around the state this week as the group gathers information for a report due this spring on textbook prices .

About three dozen people attended a similar forum held earlier this week at Georgia State University in Atlanta and about four dozen came to a forum Wednesday at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, said regents employee Jim Flowers, who moderated Thursday's panel discussion and question-and-answer session.

Still, the cost of college texts has been identified as a "central issue" in the rising cost of a college education, according to Daniel Papp, a vice chancellor for the University System of Georgia.

Textbook prices have risen an average of about 7 percent a year for the past three years, according to the Follett Higher Education Group, the company that operates UGA's on-campus bookstore. UGA students pay an average of more than $700 per year for textbooks.

Several factors are driving costs up, including overseas piracy and rising production costs, said one panelist, Rich Bigger of publisher John Wiley and Sons. The used textbook market has become much more effective at re-distributing textbooks, meaning publishers have less opportunity to recoup costs, and professors increasingly want newer textbooks, Bigger said.

Another panelist, UGA administrator and political science professor Del Dunn, challenged the cost estimates he had seen. Most of the time, students can re-sell books back to the college bookstore - typically at half the new cost, according to another panelist, Faye Silverman, director of the bookstore and auxiliary services at Kennesaw State University.

That means the net cost to students is much lower, since they can get much of their money back, Dunn said.

Still, Dunn and other panelists said textbook costs are a concern, and suggested ways they might be reduced.

Dunn said his first priority as a teacher is to give students the best "learning environment" possible, and that includes the best texts. But if he and other professors were more aware of the costs of the books their students have to buy, that could influence the teachers' choice of texts, he said.

Bigger said his company "can and will do the best we can to save the students money," citing a recent 40-book textbook deal signed with the National Geographic Society. None of the books will be priced more than $60, he said.

And as so-called "e-content" becomes more sophisticated, students will increasingly read their books and articles online rather than on paper, he said. With no cost to print, bind or ship electronic content, electronic books are less costly to produce. But in the company's first trial, students didn't like using electronic versions, even though the cost to the students was just 40 percent of the printed version, he said.